🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <46549@netnews.upenn.edu> yee@mipgsun.mipg.upenn.edu (Conway Yee) writes:
>Ok, I'll bite.  What's the problem?  Licensing merely mandates a minimum
>level of competency.  Many other professions have licensing procedures
>for exactly that reason.  Would you prefer to be treated by a doctor who
>did not have a license to practice medicine?

It's possible that someone could design a licensing procedure that
wouldn't be a problem.  But clearly the attempt to have only one type
of licensing for all types of programmers is ludicrous.  There is life-
critical programming (software for air traffic control or medical equipment,
for example) and there's video game software.  As best I can tell, NJ
would demand the same sort of qualification to do either.  We don't need
to protect people from poorly designed games; the market will do that just
fine.

If licensing were restricted to life-critical programming I'd have less
of a problem.  They are likely to impose some arbitrary requirement
that unfairly discriminates -- e.g. requiring a CS degree when, for
many purposes, a specialist who knows the needs of a particular field
and also knows something about programming is a better bet.


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Joe Buck
jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu	 {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck